Australia to datacenter operators: BYO energy, pay your way, build green, or stay home

Summary

Asia In Brief Australia’s government on Monday announced a set of datacenter “expectations” to guide would-be bit barn builders who contemplate breaking ground down under. The expectations strongly suggest that datacenter builders create their own electricity generation capacity, and pay for energy transmission and infrastructure costs. “Energy-intensive data centre proposals not closely aligned with the expectations will not be prioritised by Commonwealth regulatory assessments,” states the formal expectations document. The expectations also call on datacenter operators to prioritise Australia’s national interest, use water sustainably and responsibly, invest in local skills and jobs, and do all that while strengthening the nation’s “research, innovation and local capability.” Industry lobby group the Tech Council of Australia welcomed the expectations, as did the Electrical Trades Union. Hong Kong raid nets 14,000 counterfeit hard disks Hong Kong’s customs agency last week raided a local distributor and seized around 17,000 data storage devices – ~14,000 hard disks and ~3,000 memory cards – suspected of being counterfeits. The agency’s announcement of the raid says Customs “received information from the trademark owner representative” ahead of the raid, which resulted in one arrest. Images provided by Hong Kong’s government show devices branded as Samsung, SanDisk, and Western Digital. Singtel CEO apologizes after triple outage Singapore’s dominant telco, Singtel, last week experienced three outages. As explained in an apologetic Facebook post, on March 16th a “mechanical fault” meant around 15 percent of customers struggled to connect their mobile phones to the company’s network. Full service returned over eight hours later. On the 17th, a badly-implemented software upgrade took out 2,000 mobile customers. “This issue was not immediately apparent as it coincided with the earlier incident,” Singtel admitted. In the wake of those incidents, the carrier reconfigured...